Our Safety Culture: Our Behaviour is the Key

Abstract

Abstract The occupational safety literature increasingly focuses on the organizational nature of health and safety performance and the concept of safety culture is widely discussed under this banner. It is now commonly accepted that a strong safety culture is fundamental to an organisation's ability to achieve excellent safety performance. Moreover, research concurs that strong safety leadership, effective supervision and workforce involvement play a critical part in fostering safety culture (e.g. HSE, 1999; HSE 2001; Flin, Mearns, O'Connor & Bryden, 2000; Zohar, 2002). Various approaches have been employed to improve safety culture. A typical approach is to conduct a safety culture diagnosis at the site or organisation level and develop and implement improvement plans based on the results. In such approaches, the improvement plan usually targets a need for change in behaviours and practices at different levels of the organisation. Another common method for enhancing safety culture is interventions that target one occupational level—for example, implementing an observation and feedback program at the workforce level, or a development program at the leadership level. Although these approaches are appropriate in some circumstances, they do not describe the behaviours required at different occupational levels to foster a strong safety culture, nor specify how these behaviours relate to each other and are mutually supportive across different levels of the organisation. Furthermore, such methods do not readily lend themselves to integration into the organisation's safety management and human resource systems. This need is particularly important in light of recent safety research demonstrating that organizational characteristics influence safety climate (Novatsis, 2004; Wallace, Popp & Mondore, 2006), a concept commonly recognised as providing an indicator of the underlying safety culture of a site or organization. In addition, effective human resource systems have been shown to relate positively to safety climate and safety outcomes (Zacharatos, Barling, & Iverson, 2005), suggesting that safety culture improvement initiatives should be linked to broader organisational systems designed to enhance the performance of people. Such an approach provides reinforcement to foster sustainable change.